Eliot sees myth and ritual (the use of anthropological material) as a potential means of
ordering and transforming into significance contemporary experience. Their technical
function seems to have been even more important to him than their symbolic meaning. By
November 1923, after The Waste Land’s publication, Eliot is ever more explicit about this
problem. The very title of his review in “The Dial” of Joyce’s Ulysses make the point - Ulysses,
Order and Myth.
He sets out to answer the challenge of readers who, in terms used by many
early readers of The Waste Land, saw Ulysses as “an invitation to chaos; an expression of
feelings which are perverse, partial and a distortion of reality”. Eliot, in answer to this, calls
the work classical and complains that that people have underestimated the
importance of the Odyssey parallel as a structural device
“In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him”. Then comes
the famous remark which sounds so like a comment on his own The Waste Land: “It is simply
a way of controlling and ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.
Eliot’s own technique for presenting, the “immense panorama” is different from Joyce’s. By
compression and allusion he condenses it where Joyce expands the moment almost to
infinitude, but both resort to a black-cloth of mythology to hold their material in
share.